The History of the New England to Nova Scotia Ferry Service, From the Evangeline to the Cat

The sea route connecting New England to Nova Scotia is one of the oldest continuously contested ferry corridors in North America, and its story is really the story of seven different companies and vessels trying to solve the same problem: getting people and cars across the Gulf of Maine faster than the highway around it allows. Regularly scheduled steam service between Yarmouth and Boston began in May of 1855 with the steamship Eastern State, launching a run that continued through war and peace for the next century. By the twentieth century that tradition had passed to Eastern Steamship Lines, and it was that company’s ships, not yet the Bluenose everyone remembers, that were making the crossing when the 1950s began.

The vessels most associated with that early era were SS Evangeline and her sister ship, SS Yarmouth, both built by William Cramp and Sons in Philadelphia and put into service on the New York to Yarmouth route by 1927, sailing occasional out of Boston as well. The pair spent World War II in government service before returning to passenger duty in 1947, but growing competition from airlines pushed Eastern Steamship to pull them from the Nova Scotia run entirely in 1948, laying them up in New York, with only a brief reactivation of Evangeline for a handful of Boston to Nova Scotia trips in the summer of 1950. By the time the 1950s were in full swing, the service was on its last legs as a private venture. The operation had become practically profitless for Eastern Steamship, and it was only a subsidy from the Nova Scotia government that kept Yarmouth and Evangeline running through the 1954 season while a government-built replacement was under construction. That replacement was the ship that would define the route for the next four decades.

Southwestern Nova Scotia had lobbied Ottawa for years for a dedicated ferry link, and in 1949 the Canadian Maritime Commission began studying a connection to a New England port, eventually settling on Bar Harbor over the traditional Boston and New York calls. In 1954 the federal government contracted Davie Shipbuilding to build MV Bluenose, launched in 1955 and placed into service in 1956 under Canadian National Railway. The Yarmouth ferry terminal officially opened on December 20, 1955, with the Bluenose’s arrival, and her first passenger sailing on January 4, 1956, began a link between Nova Scotia and Maine that would last more than forty years. For most of that run the Bluenose was a slower, six hour crossing, but she became the emotional anchor of the route in a way none of her successors ever quite managed.

While the Bluenose settled into its Bar Harbor routine through the late 1950s and 1960s, it took until 1970 for a real challenger to appear. That year the European operator Lion Ferry launched a rival service out of Portland, further south and closer to Boston and the I-95 corridor, using MS Prince of Fundy to carry passengers to Yarmouth. Lion Ferry then brought in the MS Bolero between 1973 and 1976 to sail alongside the Prince of Fundy, then replaced both with the larger MS Caribe, which ran solo from 1976 to 1981. The government-run Bar Harbor operation did not sit still while this happened. In 1978 CN Marine, the Crown corporation now running the Bluenose, added a second vessel of its own, MV Marine Evangeline, to compete directly with Lion Ferry on the Portland route rather than simply defending Bar Harbor. For a few years in the late 1970s, Nova Scotia’s government ferry service was effectively running boats against a private European competitor on the competitor’s own turf.

The rivalry hit a turning point in 1982, when both sides refreshed their fleets in the same year. Lion Ferry’s Portland franchise had by then passed to Prince of Fundy Cruises, which purchased the former Stena Olympica, renamed her Scotia Prince, and put her into service as a more upscale, casino-equipped overnight alternative to the government boat. CN Marine, not to be outdone, retired the original 1955 Bluenose that same year and replaced her with the former Stena Jutlandica, renamed Bluenose to keep the brand recognizable to returning tourists. Scotia Prince was lengthened by eighteen meters in a 1986 and 1987 refit that pushed her past a thousand berths, while CN Marine itself was reorganized into the new Crown corporation Marine Atlantic in 1986. Both operators kept sailing their own routes into Yarmouth through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Marine Atlantic to Bar Harbor and Prince of Fundy Cruises to Portland, until Ottawa’s patience with subsidizing the Bar Harbor side ran out.

That subsidy ended in 1997, and it was Bay Ferries, not Marine Atlantic, that stepped into the rivalry from that point forward. Bay Ferries took over the Bar Harbor route, ran the existing Bluenose for one final season, and in 1998 replaced her with the high speed catamaran that became known simply as the Cat, cutting the crossing from six hours to under three. That change reframed the old competition entirely. Where the fight had once been between two conventional ferries on two different Maine ports, it was now speed against comfort: Bay Ferries’ three hour catamaran against Prince of Fundy Cruises’ overnight cruise experience, which was rebranded Scotia Prince Cruises after a 2000 ownership change. Bay Ferries doubled down in 2002, upgrading from the original 300 foot Cat to a larger 320 foot catamaran, a fifty million dollar U.S. investment that gave it more capacity to draw passengers away from the Portland boat.

The rivalry ended the way a lot of long competitions do, with one side simply collapsing. Scotia Prince Cruises discovered dangerous levels of mold in its leased Portland terminal in 2004, canceled its 2005 season outright, and never sailed the route again, ending a Portland service that had run continuously since Lion Ferry’s arrival 35 years earlier. Bay Ferries absorbed the vacated route in 2006, sending the Cat to Portland and Bar Harbor on alternating days now that it no longer had a rival to worry about. That consolidation did not make the business durable. The 2008 recession, rising security costs, and the loss of government subsidy caught up with Bay Ferries by the end of 2009, and it suspended the entire Gulf of Maine operation that December, putting about 120 people out of work. The Cat vessel itself, the Incat hull 059, did not stay idle. She resurfaced in 2011 as the Hai Xia Hao, ferrying passengers across the Taiwan Strait, a very long way from the route she had once fought to control.

The corridor sat dark for four years before Nova Star Cruises tried to revive the Portland side of it alone, with no rival left to compete against. Nova Star Cruises acquired the former Norman Leader, renamed her MV Nova Star, and launched service in May 2014 with a great deal of fanfare. The economics never worked. The first season drew only 59,000 passengers against a goal of 100,000, Nova Scotia had already committed more than 30 million Canadian dollars in subsidies, and Nova Star Cruises filed for bankruptcy in April 2016. The province declined to renew the contract and turned instead to the operator with the longest history on the route.

Bay Ferries returned in 2016, and this is where the naming gets confusing if you are not careful with it. The vessel it brought to this service is the HSC Alakai, and the Alakai and the Cat are the same ship, not two different ones. She was built by Austal USA and delivered to Hawaii Superferry in 2007 for interisland service between Oahu and Maui, a service that collapsed in 2009 after Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruled the law permitting it to skip environmental review unconstitutional. The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command took custody of her in 2012, and she sat in lay-up until Bay Ferries negotiated a bareboat charter for her in 2016. Because that charter left ownership still with the Navy, the ship’s legal, registered name has stayed Alakai the entire time she has run for Bay Ferries, even to this day. The Cat is the commercial brand Bay Ferries paints on her hull and sells tickets under, reviving a name it had used since 1998, but the vessel underneath that branding is, and has always been since 2016, the Alakai. After a refit at Detyens Shipyard in Charleston, ironically where your author had run into her while also at Detyens at the time, she entered Portland to Yarmouth service in June 2016. A 2017 engine failure forced the cancellation of roughly a quarter of that season’s crossings and construction delays at a new Bar Harbor terminal wiped out the entire 2019 season. The COVID-19 pandemic idled her for two more years after that.

The Alakai, still sailing as the Cat, finally returned to the water in the spring of 2022, this time out of Bar Harbor rather than Portland for the first time since Bay Ferries’ 2016 relaunch. Ridership climbed roughly 30 percent in the 2024 season, and Nova Scotia’s government confirmed continued subsidy support through 2025 and 2026, with passengers contributing more than 20 million Canadian dollars to the provincial economy in 2023. The current schedule runs mid-May to mid-October, a 3.5 hour crossing on a vessel that started her working life ferrying commuters between Hawaiian islands and now, under Navy ownership and Canadian charter, ties New England to Nova Scotia in a fraction of the time the original Bluenose ever managed.